In this shell, now emerge is usable, e.g. to build Kate with all dependencies:

emerge kate

To create a app bundle (+ dmg file), you need to have the breeze-icons around:

emerge breeze-icons

To do deploy all things, unfortunately at the moment you need a patched macdeployqt. Example scripty for kate can be found on kate.git/mac/emerge-deploy.sh

Installing KDE software on Mac OSX

The easiest way to do this is to use one of the Mac build systems which will automatically resolve all the dependencies for you. Unfortunately, this can be a very long process, taking up to 2 or more days. As at December 2012 MacPorts is currently recommended as it is the most up-to-date.

Installing using Fink

As of June 2016, the latest available and supported version is KDE SC 4.14.6.

The Fink packages allow you to install KDE SC 4 as either Qt/X11 or Qt/Mac (native) packages by selecting either packages ending in "-x11" or "-mac", for example "kdebase4-x11" and "kdebase4-mac".

Additionally, the Fink packages allow the running of the Plasma desktop in X11 mode. Just install "kdebase4-workspace-x11" to install it.

The Fink KDE software packages will be installed in /sw/opt/kde4/x11 or /sw/opt/kde4/mac respectively. They also are able to start D-Bus for you as long as you run "/sw/bin/init.sh" normally, or when you open a terminal, if you have run the path setup script in the Fink installer.

Installing KDE Frameworks 5 using Homebrew

As of June 2016, the latest available and supported version is KDE SC 5.22.0.

You can tap this repository into your homebrew. It adds KDE Frameworks 5 packages (and all their dependencies) and some applications that already make use of them (e.g. Kate and Kwrite). As of March 28th, 2014 the repository still is experimental as the developer tries to get them into a working state. Hints and patches are welcome.